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Rescued from the flames: the Cotton Genesis restored to life<br>New multispectral imaging at the British Library has helped us to read more clearly one of the earliest surviving illuminated Bibles.<br>19 June 2026

Blog series Medieval manuscripts<br>Authors Calum Cockburn, Curator of Medieval Manuscripts, and Elena Lichmanova, Curator of Illuminated Manuscripts

On the night of 29 October 1731, a terrible fire devastated the library of Ashburnham House in London. The library was the home of the famous Cotton collection, containing many iconic historical and literary treasures. Among them was the Cotton Genesis (Cotton MS Otho B VI), a 5th-century copy of the Book of Genesis in Greek, one of the earliest surviving illuminated Bibles in the world.

A page from the Cotton Genesis, showing an inlaid burnt fragment, with the remains of an illustration barely visible: Cotton MS Otho B VI f. 3r.

The losses were truly tragic. The fire reduced most of the volume’s pages to blackened fragments and rendered its texts and illustrations barely visible to the naked eye. Once an impressive volume of 166 folios with hundreds of illustrations, the Cotton Genesis now consists of only 129 burned fragments. The largest of them, measuring 17.4 x 14.9 cm, is approximately twice smaller than the size of the manuscript’s pages before the fire; the smallest surviving remnant is less than two centimetres in size.<br>Thanks to the generosity of the Goldhammer Foundation, the British Library has been able to apply new multispectral imaging technology to the manuscript, allowing its pages to be read for the first time in hundreds of years.

A fragment of the Cotton Genesis in visible and ultraviolet light, with the fragment under the ultraviolet light revealing the clearly visible text in Greek: Cotton MS Otho B VI f. 38r.

Pages whose text was completely illegible underwent the most striking transformation. Under visible light, f. 38r shows episodes described at the end of Genesis 22. Abraham returns with his son Isaac after God had spared Isaac from being sacrificed and hears the news that Nahor, Abraham’s brother, bore twelve children. While the image is barely visible, the Greek text above the image is impossible to read with the naked eye. Under ultraviolet light, the entire text suddenly becomes clear. We see that the lines in Greek indeed refer to Genesis 22:22-23:1, ending:<br>ΕΓΕΝΕΤΟ ΔΕ Η ΖΩΗ ΣΑΡΡΑΣ ΕΚΑΤ[ΟΝ] ΕΙΚΟΣΙ ΕΠΤΑ. ETH ΖΩΗΣ ΣΑΡΡΑ[Σ]<br>And Sarah lived a hundred and twenty-seven years. The years of the life of Sarah…

The page with the illustration showing God commanding Abraham to leave Haran in visible and ultraviolet lights: Cotton MS Otho B VI f. 18r.

The page under ultraviolet light shows an added medieval inscription in Latin: Cotton MS Otho B VI f. 18r.

The multispectral imaging has already supported a breakthrough in the study of the Cotton Genesis. Professor Herbert Kessler, co-author of the seminal publication on the Cotton Genesis, has recently discovered several Latin inscriptions added to this Greek manuscript in the Middle Ages and early modern period. F. 18r seen under ultraviolet light reveals words in Latin added in a medieval hand, ‘Dixit D[omi]n[u]s ad Abra[m]’ (‘God said to Abraham’), next to the scene of God commanding Abraham to leave Haran.<br>Such inscriptions were not previously known to modern scholarship. Based on the shapes of their letters, they can be dated and located with surprising precision. Some of them have been identified with 12th– and 13th–century Northern Italian hands, and some date to the 15th and 16th centuries. This means that the trajectory of travel of the Cotton Genesis across Europe, only hypothetically suggested before, as well as its relation to famous artworks such as the mosaics of San Marco in Venice, can now be identified with greater clarity.

An ultraviolet image of the Cotton Genesis in the Universal Viewer: Cotton MS Otho B VI f. 16v.

The multispectral imaging of the manuscript and its fragments can be consulted on our Universal Viewer, available through the Explore Archives and Manuscripts catalogue. As part of this work, the British Library’s Universal Viewer team has also applied IIIF-based functionality to enable users to switch between the visible light, ultraviolet and infrared images of a single folio in the same canvas. You can also pan out, zoom in and rotate the images and change their brightness and contrast to study the fragments in closer detail.

Visible, infrared, and ultraviolet light images of the Cotton Genesis: Cotton MS Otho B VI/2 Fragment 3r.

We are celebrating the completion of the multispectral imaging campaign and the launch of the new images on the British Library website with a conference on 19 June 2026 dedicated to the manuscript. Multispectral Gaze: New Approaches to...